The Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz

In 1943 a women's orchestra was formed at one of the most brutal death camps ever created on the order of German SS officers. Some forty-seven or so young girls who had been sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau from various countries, played in this hotch-potch band of hurriedly assembled instruments. For almost all of them it saved their lives. Although several other camps boasted male orchestras, there was no other female orchestra in any of the camps, prisons or ghettos created by the Nazis. It lasted for little over a year and at its height reached a high level of performance largely thanks to a strict rehearsal timetable of at least ten hours a day insisted on by its conductor, the Austrian violinist, Alma Rosé.

In addition to playing when the workers went out in the morning and came back into the camp at the end of the day in a bizarre attempt to keep the weary prisoners in lock step as they tried to march in time to the music, they also performed at a concert at least once every Sunday. Occasionally they were summoned by Nazi officers to give individual performances of a favourite piece of music, purely as entertainment of a perverted kind, perhaps for a birthday. Here is one of the fundamental conundrums at the heart of this story; how was it possible that these most barbaric killers could apparently display genuine emotion on hearing such beautiful music?

Even at its height the women's orchestra of Auschwitz was always something of a raggle-taggle mixture of amateurs, staying just one step ahead of their volatile oppressors. They were strengthened by having a few experienced musicians but everyone depended on each other, polished performers and relative beginners, all hoping in their weakened state they could play well enough together to stay alive until liberation. That most of them did reveals the extraordinary determination and reliance on female solidarity required to make the group successful.

How and why was the orchestra formed, who were its members and what was its role in Nazi propaganda? Was it aimed at masking the atrocities in the camps or to provide solace to the perpetrators? What was the effect on those who owe their survival to being a part of this project and the inevitable compromises that were made? Can this possibly be described as complicity with the Nazis? These are just some of the tangled questions of deep moral complexity that Anne Sebba will examine as she tells the remarkable story of these women for the first time.